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Lyric Essay

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When I was a child I had a small flip book—a kind of notebook bestiary. Each page was smudged and brimming with portraits made of wings and teeth, of sunflower petals and horns: desires made up of scales and yellowed toenails abutting soft green flesh. I realize now they were reflections of something I did not understand, and collected from ideas of a world that seemed breathtakingly huge and possible.

In hindsight, they betrayed my desperate urge to create something that had never existed before.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve never stopped drawing monsters. But largely, these reflections have shifted from those creatures that do not exist to those that do, albeit ones that are mangled and magnified into ridged, and painful constructions...

The man leaning over the window is volatile. The winds could carry him without a trace of noise, particularly on a night like this. His eyes are contorted by a sudden loss of memory, his fingers tap restlessly on the sill. His voice is nebulous—a gathering of clouds in pursuit of its shadows. Everything seems to be lost here, even his body.

He leans closer to the mirror to realize he has lost it. Where did it go?
Answers seem to evade his feeble ears.

Somewhere far away, a horse neighs softly. That is his voice, it dawns upon him. His reality. When he drapes it around himself, the moon will no longer be a stranger. The sun a myth. He will stop wondering about the stars in the horizon, their irreparable losses.
Perhaps, someday.